Tackling the Challenges of Data Silos

Deliver a consistent and complete view of information with Cognos 8 BI

By Harriet Fryman, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Cognos Incorporated

"Data, data everywhere and not an easy way to use it".

Ok, so the original saying was "Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink", but they mean the same thing – the irony of being surrounded by something you want that you cannot make use of. That is often how users feel when they are faced with data overload and have no clear way to turn that data into a competitive advantage for the business. In this article, we'll identify the four key capabilities unique to Cognos 8 BI that help you make this connection between users and data.

Figure 1: Cognos 8 BI helps deliver consistent and complete information

Information Challenges

Most businesses face an ever-growing volume of data silos across multiple, disparate sources. According to TDWI research, organizations have, on average, 2.1 data warehouses, 6 independent data marts, 4.5 operational data stores, and 28.5 spreadmarts –– ouch!

Given this complex data landscape, how can you ensure all users gain a complete view of information and trust the information they see?

A successful and strategic BI solution must provide:

• A consistent view of data across reports and the organization
• Full control over a users' view of data
• Consistent and predictable access to data
• Complete access to all data wherever it resides

Cognos 8 BI provides a common business model, secure data access, consistent query of information, and open data access to all data – for all users across all BI capabilities.

1. A Common Business Model to ensure everyone is working with the same numbers

Cognos 8 is the only BI product with a common business model that underpins and drives all BI capabilities – reporting, analysis, dashboards, scorecards and event management. The common business model ensures delivery of information to business users in terms they understand. It also insulates them from the underlying complexity of physical data storage, so their view is not constrained or impacted by the fragmentation of where data is stored.

Cognos 8 BI provides a consistent and complete view of information. Consistency and completeness builds user trust and user trust builds user adoption. When everyone works from the same numbers, business users can focus on strategic decision making instead of worrying about data validation. This makes users more efficient and effective. Plus by insulating business users from the data storage complexity, IT is free to evolve their data sourcing strategies when they choose, without significantly impacting the user.

2. Granular Data Security to provide full control over each user's view of data

Cognos 8 BI provides comprehensive and granular data-level security to control user access to information. This granular data security can apply to a hierarchy level, or be applied to individual rows, data or measures. Security is defined and managed centrally and can be driven by individual users or any user group definition.

This means that users can only access the information they should see and the business can ensure they comply with governance rules for sensitive data, such as Human Resources or Financial information. In addition, applying security at the data level means one report definition can deliver different content to different users and eliminate the proliferation of reports.

With easy control over data access, IT has the freedom to centralize or host multiple projects and user communities while still ensuring different areas of the business only have visibility into the information they need.

3. Single Query Service to provide consistent and predictable access to data

Cognos 8 BI provides a single query service across all BI capabilities and all data sources. It acts as a point of interface with the source systems to provide consistency of source access and query predictability for IT. The single query service can access all kinds of data including relational, dimensionally-modeled data and multi-dimensional cubes. In addition it understands how to optimize data retrieval by leveraging the power of individual source systems.

The single query service, in conjunction with the common business model, can access data from any data source, predictably, through a single interface. In addition, it can query transactional, dimensionally-modeled relational and multi-dimensional sources. This allows Cognos 8 BI to breakdown physical silos of data and pull data together so there is no chance of data disagreement in different reports and dashboards.

With a single query service, IT can manage access to a particular data source consistently, regardless of BI capability. This eliminates multiple connection methods and breaks down the barriers to accessing data from different physical storage locations.

4. Open Data Access with a flexible sourcing strategy to gain complete access to all data wherever it resides

With Open Data Access, all Cognos BI capabilities can gain access to any combination of data sources including transactional, dimensional and modern sources like XML. In addition, Open Data Access gives IT the flexibility to leverage any combination of sourcing strategies whether working directly against transactional systems like ERP, existing data marts and data warehouses, federating data to combine data on-the-fly, or building new data marts.

The key word is "open". Open Data Access provides what most organizations need in terms of data access AND it can leverage the existing information infrastructure already in place, provide ETL, or integrate with other information management providers like IBM (Ascential) or Informatica to ensure organizations can easily gain a complete and consistent view of information.

With Cognos 8 start leveraging these capabilities to make the connection between users and data, and provide a consistent and complete view of information to the business.